Chinese English Learners' Acquisition Of Partitive Noun Phrases

This thesis explores Chinese learners'acquisition of partitive noun phrases. English noun phrases can be classified into two broad categories:simple noun phrases and partitve noun phrases. Compared with simple noun phrases, partitive noun phrases are so complex that it is even difficult for native speakers. Partitive noun phrases seldom appear in Chinese English learners'interlanguage, and when partitive noun phrases are needed, Chinese English learners use simple noun phrases instead.Since the study is dealing with Chinese learners'errors in partitive noun phrases, the analysis in the thesis is based on the theory of Error Analysis. Moreover Chinese learners often confuse simple noun phrases with partitive noun phrase. The present study uses the two constructions as a minimal pair, and then identifies their similarities and differences to explore the reason why the Chinese English learners seldom use partitve noun phrases.The study reveals that partitive noun phrases are rather difficult for Chinese learner to acquire. Even college students have difficulties in mastering partitive noun phrases successfully. And the mastery of partitive noun phrases has a positive correlation with Chinese learners'language proficiency. Moreover Chinese learners' errors in partitive noun phrases have many sources. Some of them can be traced back to their first language influence, whereas others result from crosslinguistic influences. The first reason why Chinese English learners do not use partitive noun phrases is that in most cases definiteness in English language is overtly expressed in the word the, whereas definiteness is covertly expressed in Chinese Language because of lack of definte articles. The second reason is that Chinese language belongs to left-branching, whereas English language belongs to right-branching. And the structure of simple noun phrases in English is similar to that in Chinese language. As a consequence, Chinese learners substitute partitive noun phrases with simple noun phrases. The third reason is that according to the comparison between the accuracy of partitive noun phrases in Chinese learners' written material and the frequency of occurrence of patitive noun phrases in BNC, the study reveals that the accuracy of partitive noun phrases has a positive correlation with the frequency of occurrence of partitive noun phrases. In other words. the third source results from insufficient exposure. Based on these findings, the thesis ends with some suggestions for English language instruction in China.